Six Things Physical Product Development Taught Me About Experience Design

How a journey into the heart of physical product development gave one designer new perspective on designing digital experiences.

Article No :1305 | September 10, 2014 | by Anthony Franco

A couple years ago, I sold the experience design agency I co-founded. The same year, I decided to pursue a curious product passion of mine: democratizing the conference room with a portable, modular, dry-erase board system. I went through SolidWorks courses to immerse myself in CAD. I purchased a large-format, high-resolution 3D printer to build prototypes. I believed I was equipped to create an amazing product.

A few months later, I felt confident entering the small, windowless conference room of a local plastic injection company. I sat at a blue pop-up kitchen table with mismatched chairs around it. The wallpaper in the room was peeling and the floors were covered in old peel-and-stick laminate. The room was a far cry from the large enterprise conference rooms I’ve been in hundreds of times, running through UX projects with executives. Still, this dilapidated room was the first one I was ever laughed out of after sharing my design for something I wanted to produce. I had a lot to learn.

Over the last two years of functional prototyping, field-testing, and research, I’ve realized that I have learned a number of things developing a physical product that are making me a better experience design professional. Here are six of them:

1. Digital is Easy

Okay, so maybe “easy” is the wrong word, but with digital there are many luxuries that don’t exist when creating a physical thing. Compared to manufactured product development, launching a mobile or web product is dramatically less complicated. I’m not just talking about the development tools we have, but also the fact that we have the ability to launch something before it is fully baked. Unlike an app that lives online, once you launch a physical product, you can’t re-work the design for those customers that have made a purchase. There is no version 1.0. Instead it’s “launch it right the very first time or you are probably out of business.”

In the beta launch environment, we have become too quick-to-launch. We don’t take the necessary time to make a product great before we expose our customers to it. We are too caught up in having the first-mover advantage. Part of the problem is that we don’t see a digital experience as product that is purchased (purchasing an app would, of course, be the exception). The reality is that every digital experience is a point of sale. Money does not change hands, but there is something being sold. You are selling a good first impression and a positive experience.

The ROI is the user’s willingness to return and go through the experience again. If it’s true that you only have one shot at getting a manufactured product right, then it holds that you only have one chance to make a good first impression with a digital experience. A study EffectiveUI commissioned with Harris Interactive proves this out: a negative app experience does lasting damage to your brand. There is a huge market opportunity for more thoughtful products that take years, instead of months, to launch.

2. Prototype is a Verb

I’ve often listed “functional prototype” as a deliverable in a statement of work to a client. I realize now that there is no such “thing” as a prototype. Prototype is a concept we borrowed from the traditional product development because we didn’t have a better word for what we were doing. Prototype is an action—something we do in order to solve a particular business, design, or technical problem.

Clients expect prototypes, but they do little to serve the product, mostly because there is an expected fidelity of any design deliverable. I prototyped my portable whiteboards (called mc squares) to get the feel just right; to make sure the wall-mounting system worked perfectly; to test manufacturability; to watch people use the system for design improvements; etc. I never considered a prototype as a “deliverable”—at least not in the same way I did on a software project. As the person responsible for creating a good product, prototyping was simply my preferred design process.

3. Designers Have to “Own” the Product

In the digital product world we have project mangers, product owners, business analysts, technical architects, developers, and (hopefully) experience designers. In the past, I’ve always struggled with the question, “who owns the product?” The process of physical product design has definitively answered that question for me: the lead designer owns the product. The lead designer is responsible for understanding the business goals, the users, and the stakeholders. This person is also responsible for ensuring the product is intuitive and draws on empathy to guide users.

This means that there is a significant responsibility for designers to understand how something will be built. It’s next to impossible to design something great without knowing how it will be engineered, which leads me to my next point.

4. Engineering is Design

For me, software design is more intuitive because I use software, and I was once a practicing software engineer myself. I can design something with perspective on how it will be built. When I started 3D printing prototypes, however, I focused on the utility, the form, and the feel of the product. I assumed that what was 3D printable (prototype-able) was also manufacture-able. That assumption, and the following laughter, was what lead to me being escorted out of that little conference room in the middle of a local plastic injection company.

Honestly, given my background and experience, I should have known better. But I didn’t. Even worse: I was surprised by the rejection. This gave me a ton of empathy for designers who have never coded anything into a production environment. I’ve developed a more profound respect for designers who intuitively recognize they can’t design effectively until they fully understand how a product is going to be engineered.

5. One Product at a Time

As I was writing this article, one of my project managers came to me for advice on a problem she was having on an account. A client basically terminated a contract with us, explaining that they did not have the capacity to manage a vendor. I asked her about the person on the client side who was responsible for our relationship. It turns out, that person was their internal designer, who was also responsible for two other products and their website redesign—all of them due at the same time.

As the product owner, the lead designer must be held accountable for one (and only one) product at one time. They need time to create, think, experiment, problem solve, fail, and create again. In other words, they need the space and freedom to prototype. The creative process is difficult enough with necessary deadlines. Once you add distractions you wind up with “okay” visual design on products that have not been design architected; you wind up with pretty products that don’t fully serve your customers in the way they deserve.

6. Expand the Scope of Your Empathy

We often say that we must develop empathy for our users in order to create great digital products, but know now that we also need to develop empathy for the other disciplines as well. If a designer places a demand on an engineer, then the designer should have some idea of the workload that demand creates. Conversely, engineers need to understand the “whys” of the design. People should be allowed the time in their workday to “play” in a different discipline.

I’m a better designer because I took on something outside of my day-to-day responsibilities and pushed my skills well beyond my comfort zone. If you’re a designer, I encourage you to take on a side project that is not directly in your area of expertise. If you manage designers, encourage them to create something on their own that might not even have anything to do with your business. They will be better designers for it.

About the Author(s)

Along with founding seven successful companies and holding multiple patents, Anthony Franco has held leadership positions in creative direction, entertainment production, technology architecture, advertising production, and enterprise consulting. He is the founder and president of Denver-based consulting firm, EffectiveUI, where he's been actively involved in the creation of hundreds of award-winning digital products for many of the world's most recognizable brands. His most recent project is designing a dry-erase collaboration system, mc squares.

Comments

Thanks for the great article. I manage a Web development team and will pass this article along to everyone.

(I noticed a typo in this sentence: "In the digital product world we have project mangers,")

Thanks again!

Scott

Vicky

September 15, 2014

Industrial design school is like computer science: people don't realise that you learn as much about functionality and scalability as you do about actually doing the darn thing (be it about coding or injection moulding). I have to admit that as soon as you said you'd been laughed out of the room I knew it was about injection moulding. Though the last time I checked (about a decade ago) there was actually a function on Solidworks that let you see any problem spots for injection moulding!

Omar Franco

September 11, 2014

Great Article Anthony! As a professionally qualified/trained Industrial Designer I have also ended up in the dark arts of the digital doman. So it's funny because you have highlighted some of the same things i have noticed and fully agree what some in the 'digital UX' field just don't quite get yet. Good luck with your product!

Jesse Janowiak

September 10, 2014

I'm curious now: what was so impractical about your design that the vendor was not even willing to work with you to fix it?

I did not design with any of the basic best practices for things that need to come out of a mold. The parts I produced had no draft (a slight angle on the sides) so it would pop out of the mold instead of stick in it.

I had features in the product that would have made the action of mold-making nearly impossible.

I did not take into account the thermodybamic properties of plastic - this sounds really fancy, but basically, the walls of our plastic part can't be drastically different in size or the plastic will buch up in the areas that thin walls connect to thick walls

The parts I had created required injection presses that very few people had because of their mass

The mass and size of the top part of the mc square would have caused the top to curl up once the plastic cooled (called "potato chipping" because that's what potato chips do when they cool)

I invented snap-fit features that were impractical, when standard snap-fit features would have sufficed

I wanted material combinations that would have been way too expensive to produce

I had unreasonable expectaitons on product cost

I also think my attitude didn't help me. I had went through the trouble of learning the CAD tool (Solidowrks) so I thought I understood the engineering - but in reaitly my CAD knowledge had the effect of making me believe I was much smarter about the subject matter than I actually was. It humbeld me, in a very profound way...